With most of my clients, we build their content calendar once a year. We spend an hour brainstorming and sorting the ideas and then choose the 12 most important topic areas they want to be known for. Those 12 topics become themes for each month of the upcoming year. Of course shorter article ideas will pop up anytime for your social media posts, though knowing your overall content calendar goals for the year is a helpful framework to have.
Here’s how to brainstorm your topic areas:
What do you want to be known for? Again, please be as specific as possible. Choose a precise problem or situation that you can discuss in detail. Perhaps you can even break it down and write multiple articles about it.
What problems do you solve?
Write for your ideal target audience. What do you want them to learn? What do you want them to do next?
Why do people hire you?
What are people getting wrong (or maybe not quite right) and what advice to you have to share?
What do you believe that most others in your area of expertise don’t believe or act upon?
When people come to you for advice what do you coach them to do?
What stories do you have to tell? (Why, when, who, what happened?)
What did you do to help someone see something they hadn’t yet realized?
Try to make your articles as detailed and personal as possible. Like the lessons you share in your keynote talks, you want people to gain insights and be inspired to do something differently to get better outcomes.
Of course use the lessons and stories from your keynote talks as article content. Don’t worry about “spoiling” the stories. You want to be known for your particular point of view which will differentiate you/your brand and increase the inquiries to your website for speaking gigs.
